Checking aberration

 
Published: Wednesday 30 April 1997

Gertrude Rempfer and her colleagues at Portland State University, US, have devised a process to counter chromatic aberration for electron microscopes -- because of which glass focuses different wavelengths at different points, leading to a blurring of the image. This will increase the resolution of high powered electron microscopes to about five times. The idea is to use an electron mirror (made from a hyperbolic electric field), which bends the electron beam by repelling the electrons. Because the amount of deflection depends on the energy of the electrons, the result is to cancel out the effects of the aberration introduced by the electron lens ( Science , Vol 275, No 5303).

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